Australian author Colleen McCullough died on 29 January 2015, aged 77. She is most famous for the novel The Thorn Birds (1977), which sold 30 million copies worldwide.

Tim, as interpreted by the editor. Photo by Jose Nuñez del Arco.

But it’s her debut work Tim (1974) that we will remember her for. In that novel, a middle aged woman falls in love with a mentally challenged teenager, and has to face society’s as well as her own prejudices as they fight for their right to love.

American-German photographer Will McBride died today, at the age of 84.

Will’s last exhibition was a photo retrospective which opened the new gallery space of C/O Berlin. It was a fitting last exhibition, summarizing his work as a postwar photographer in a shattered Berlin. Will had many themes in his art, but it is probably as an early documentary photographer, with a fresh and curious eye for capturing street life, that he will be remembered by the general public. Others will remember the coming of age theme that also runs like a red thread through his work.

Vernissage visitors looking at “Jungen beim Spielen in Charlottenburg” (Boys playing in Charlottenburg) from 1957 (top left) at the Will McBride exhibition.

I met Will briefly at the opening, to which people queued for hours – the line ran for a couple of hundred meters outside Amerikahaus. TV cameras and celebrity photographers hovered over it. Will seemed exhausted but happy by the success.

Will McBride at the opening of the exhibition Ich war verliebt in diese Stadt (I fell in Love with this City) at C/O Berlin, 30 October 2014.

Readers of this blog probably remember Will’s contributions to Destroyer; the paintings in issue 5 and the photos in issue 10 and the Appendix. He was always delighted when I brought him the printed copies.

Will was an artist who never compromised with his vision or expression, be it in photography, painting or sculpture. Thus he did not take the easy way through life. This is such a contrast to some of today’s media-savvy artists, who are very aware of how they build their brand. A real artist does not care about what other people (media) might think; he just follows his vision wherever it leads.

A Swedish TV reporter stepped out of his role as a journalist and helped him get to Sweden. The touching story is part of TV program Fosterland, which you can watch here:

http://www.svtplay.se/video/2570565/fosterland/avsnitt-1

http://www.svtplay.se/video/2570566/fosterland/avsnitt-2

As for the rest of the content, it’s a classic “good reporter meets the freaks” documentary à la Michael Moore. Meaning: You seek out some nationalistic wackos, try to understand “how they think”, let them speak so freely about it that everyone think they’re lunatic, stare shocked at them while asking a few extremely obvious questions like “should we stop a mother with her kids at the border?”, wait for the negative answer, and then cash out: Congratulations – You’re A Good Person and will shortly be awarded with The Swedish Grand Journalism Prize!

But the parts with Abed are adorable. I wish him all the best in his new home country!

Charity worker framed as child molester

Daily Mail shockingly reports about a “Paedophile private school teacher ‘as bad as Savile': He abused thousands of Kenyan boys over four decades”. The tabloid summarizes his case as such:

SH (anonymized by Destroyer) “abused teenagers at school in Devon before moving to Africa”

“He then set up a charity which worked with local schools in Kenya”

“Court heard he picked up street children before abusing them at his home “

“He was today convicted of eight offences against children as young as 10″

“Video of police interview shows moment he admitted bathing boys”

“Detectives say ‘very dangerous offender’ may have ‘many more victims'”

“One man who testified is believed to have taken his own life during the trial”

Even though we can’t know for sure, one has to assume that in this kind of cases, no real abuse has taken place. Instead, one has to assume that this is a person who made the world a better place, who helped street kids that no one else cared about. Read between the lines, people! Newspapers like Daily Mail usually twist the truth or use downright lies to destroy the reputation of decent men. It’s a witch-hunt which unfortunately is strongly supported by ordinary people.

The story puts the motives behind charity to the test. We usually don’t question what personal and maybe egotistical motives may lie behind charity:

Does a rich person give to charity in order to sooth a guilty conscience?

Does an old lady become a pater for an African child in order to pretend she has a cute little grandchild?

Of course! Those are the kind of feelings that most charities play on in their advertisement. And it shouldn’t matter what personal motives lie behind charity, because the result is the same: People are helped. The world becomes better. But if a man who likes boys – has “the personal motive” of feeling good by helping them – sets up a charity that saves hundreds of street kids from poverty, then it’s all of a sudden of huge significance that his will to help wasn’t as “pure” as other helpers’ is assumed to be (despite it’s not).

Oh, and he was giving the street boys a bath. That must have been really terrible for them…

GCHQ to tackle young Twitter users

The prime minister said a joint GCHQ and National Crime Agency unit would hunt online paedophiles with the same “effort” used to track terrorists.

…

Mr Cameron said the new unit was part of a drive to remove millions of “sickening and depraved” images from the internet.

He also said that “online child exploitation” existed on an “almost industrial scale”.

Many memes to pick here! We only miss the millions of billions of moneys that this “industry” makes.

But to comment more seriously: The article talks about “child abuse images”, which is the new word for what until recently was called “child pornography”, which in turn can mean virtually anything, like for example a screenshot from the Spanish feature film 800 Bullets. (Yes, it’s true, I know of a UK case where this movie was considered child porn and along with similar images sent a man to prison. It’s not a myth – I have the court papers.)

Nowadays, though, “child pornography” is to a large extent produced by the kids themselves. Kids and teenagers photograph their stiffies (or pussies for that matter) and share them on Twitter and Facebook. It’s “the new child porn” if you want! Or sorry, the new “child abuse images”. I guess the teenagers are abusing themselves in the same way as it was a “sin” for them to masturbate in the middle ages, a sin that also was considered “sickening and depraved”.

Following the logic of the UK prime minister’s statements, the GCHQ and the National Crime Agency will now use terrorist laws to persecute underage Twitter users, many of them LGBT youth. Way to go, UK!

“Arab brothels – where men are still men …” is the title story of Du & Ich issue 11, 1979, and for the first time in this advent calendar I’ve had to censor the crotch of a model whose age is hard to assess (he may be 15, 20 or 23 – hard to say!). Click to enlarge the spreads.

The text is an eyewitness account from a brothel in Alexandria, where the author Ernst H. Flick watches an oil wrestling show. One of the participants is “18 the most”, another is a strong black man from Sudan, a third one a blond American who runs a sport studio in the city.

To be honest, the article doesn’t have much substance. But just the fact that a gay magazine at the time would run a title story about an Arab brothel with men and boys is quite spectacular, from today’s perspective. It reminds us of what bleak copy of its brave and colorful past today’s gay press is.

That was all for this year! I hope you enjoyed the advent calendar, even if its content was more “gay” than “boy”. But “gay” used to be a more encompassing word, and that’s what I wanted to show and celebrate with this series of press clippings.

Oops, it’s already the 22nd of December! Well then, here are the last three Du & Ich covers of 1979 – you may guess which one we’ll look into on the 24th …

1979 was Alexander Ziegler’s last year as editor of Du & Ich. In the last issue, Du & Ich 12, 1979, he took farewell with these words:

It feels somewhat symbolical that the last photo of the 1970s Du & Ich is that of the cute boy in the corner, “Zum Schluß”. The boys in the gay magazines would grow scarce over the next decade, even though the 1980s too was pretty okay compared to the 1990s. But still, the 1970s was the post-Stonewall decade where boys and men were mixed in gay magazines in a way that would soon become taboo, not to say illegal.